Posted on 02/04/2013 4:41:03 PM PST by grundle
The NAACP's ludicrous idea to sue gun manufacturers is yet another attempt by the left to avoid personal responsibility for some individuals' bad behavior.
When the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People announced plans recently to file an injunctive class-action suit “to force [gun manufacturers] to distribute their product responsibly,” the NAACP president, Kweisi Mfume, noted that gun violence takes a disproportionately high toll among young black males.
According to an NAACP press release, African-American males between the ages of 15 and 24 are almost five times more likely to be injured by firearms than are white males in the same age group. “Firearm homicide has been the leading cause of death among young African-American males for nearly 30 years,” it stated.
Am I alone in seeing this as an absurd act of political desperation by the civil rights establishment? What’s next? Will Irish-Americans sue whiskey distillers, or Jews the gas company?
That last analogy only works, of course, for those who think the Holocaust was a self-inflicted wound. In fact, black leaders have already accused white and Korean liquor vendors of “invading” black communities and intoxicating their inhabitants. Boycotts have followed these charges, and anti-white, anti-Korean race riots as well.
But who forces alcohol down reluctant throats? And who makes guns shoot in ways that victimize blacks more than whites?
How can the NAACP even make the comparison between gun deaths of blacks and whites, if not as a racist insinuation that whites are somehow the cause of those “disproportionate” violent deaths, just as whites are the implied cause of nearly every other social pathology that afflicts the African-American community?
In the sociology of the left, including the NAACP, there cannot be a wound the black community inflicts on itself that is not ultimately the responsibility of malicious whites. To think otherwise would be to “blame the victim.” Only mean-spirited conservatives (like me) would even think of doing that.
The fact is that while blacks make up only 12 percent of the population, they account for 46 percent of total violent crime and 90 percent of the murders of other blacks. It is they, not whites or gun manufacturers, who are responsible for the disproportionate gun deaths of young black males.
Firearms don’t kill people. Sociopaths do. It takes a human brain to pull the trigger. If young black males abuse firearms in an irresponsible and criminal fashion, why should the firearm industry be held accountable? Why not their parents? Why not themselves?
Unfortunately, as a nation we have become so trapped in the melodrama of black victimization and white oppression that we are in danger of losing all sense of proportion. If blacks are oppressed in America, why isn’t there a black exodus? Why do all those black Haitians want to come here? To be oppressed?
In the grips of a politically inspired group psychosis, we find it natural to collude with demagogic race hustlers in support of a fantasy in which African-Americans are no longer responsible for anything negative they do, even to themselves.
If blacks constitute just under half the prison population, for example, that cannot be allowed to suggest that the black community might have a problem when it comes to raising its children as law-abiding members of society. Oh no. Such a statistic can only be explained by the racism of a criminal justice system that is incarcerating too many blacks.
Nonsense like this is proposed daily by the entire spectrum of the civil rights leadership from racist bloviator Al Sharpton to urbane Urban League President Hugh Price. Against the intimidating atmosphere this consensus creates, to suggest the obvious — that too many blacks are in prison because blacks commit too many crimes — is to be identified as an apologist for racism, and perhaps even a closet racist oneself.
The NAACP’s anti-gun lawsuit comes on the heels of the crusade to defend crack dealers because 90 percent of them are African-American and their sentences are considered “too harsh.” This insipid campaign was launched by Jesse Jackson at the Washington rally of race-hater Louis Farrakhan.
That 90 percent of crack cocaine dealers are black cannot be seen, of course, as a moral stain on those crack dealers or as a massive social problem for the community that produces them. It can only be the result of a white legal system that stigmatizes crack as a more dangerous and more culpable drug than the powder cocaine it uses itself.
Forget that the heavier penalties were originally demanded by black leaders who claimed that crack was associated with street violence in the black community and the white criminal justice system did not care enough about its destructive consequences to make the penalties harsh.
That was then, this is now. And now, lessening the sentences that were previously raised has become a crusade for “social justice” that overshadows the need to combat the crime wave itself. Because racial oppression is the main enemy, the villainy of the crack trade is transformed into yet another symbol of white unfairness.
This kind of race baiting has now intruded into the presidential contest as a means of smearing the Republican leader, George W. Bush, who is distinguished by his outreach to minority communities and by his support among blacks. Is there a vast left-wing conspiracy that sees Bush’s black support as a political threat?
Well, of course there is. It is precisely because Bush is perceived as a candidate who can break the vicious stereotyping of Republicans as anti-black that he has to be smeared. Bush was thus labeled Governor Death in a Christopher Hitchens column.
The clear implication of Hitchens’ attack was that Bush is collusive in a racist justice system in Texas that executes blacks in disproportionate numbers. “Perhaps you wonder if capital punishment is unevenly applied, as respects race and class, in the state of Texas,” wrote Hitchens. “Wonder no longer. Just read the Amnesty report Killing With Prejudice: Race and the Death Penalty in the USA.”
Well, Christopher, I read the Amnesty report. Maybe you should, too. The Amnesty report does not even mention racial or class statistics in Texas and could not possibly be used to draw such a conclusion. Moreover, a perusal of the report reveals no self-evident truths even nationally. Rather, it is a slovenly produced, inflammatory document.
Under the heading “Racist Representation of Indigent Defendants,” for example, it offers this evidence: “Gary Burns, black, executed in Indiana on 20 November 1997, was described to the jury by his white attorney as an ‘insignificant, snivelly little street person.’” End of example.
What is this supposed to prove? That someone else must have done the dirty work because Burns was too weak to be guilty of it himself? Who can tell from this example? Most of the report consists of unsystematic and frustratingly brief snippets of cases like this, combined with a sprinkling of unanalyzed statistics that are arrayed to serve a partisan agenda.
It is true that the number of blacks executed in Texas (and nationwide) is greater than their proportion in the population. But it is also true that the proportion of black murderers far exceeds the proportion of blacks in the population at large. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics 1996 report (released May 1999), blacks commit 54 percent of the homicides in America even though they constitute only 12 percent of the population.
An individual black male is eight times more likely to commit murder than an individual white male. Thus, in the most equitable system imaginable, a black male would be eight times more likely than a white male to be executed for murder.
In fact, however, convicted white murderers are more likely to be executed for their crimes than convicted black murderers. In 1996-97, whites accounted for 62 percent of the convicted murderers executed in Texas. According to statistics provided by the Justice Department, the proportion of whites presently on death row compared to the total white population is almost four times that of the comparable proportion of blacks on death row in terms of the total black population.
Whatever these statistics prove, it is not that justice in America is systemically biased against blacks. But the desperation to prove white turpitude is so great that instead of celebrating this as a triumph of civil rights reform in the law, the race baiters merely shift their focus to the victims of capital crimes.
Thus the statistic with which Amnesty opens its case is this: “Of the 500 prisoners executed between 1977 and 1998,” according to Amnesty, “81.8 [percent] were convicted of murdering a white person, even though blacks and whites are the victims of homicide in almost equal numbers nationwide.”
No attempt is made of course to explain how the criminal justice system might systematically discriminate in favor of white victims but not against black defendants (except by this indirect method). What the report’s raw statistic fails to take into account is that the death penalty is only imposed in aggravated circumstances, which can include the violence of the crime, whether it is committed in the course of another crime or whether the perpetrator has a prior criminal record of violent crimes.
All these factors are ignored in the Amnesty report. It so happens that black felons commit 43 percent of aggravated assaults, 66 percent of armed robberies, 27 percent of rapes and 85 percent of interracial crimes of violence, mainly against whites (this last figure from a Justice Department report for 1993).
Since juries generally don’t demand the death penalty for crimes of passion, where the victim is known to the killer, and since blacks are far more likely to commit violent crimes against whites than are whites against blacks, the disparity that offends Amnesty may not imply a racial bias on the part of prosecutors and juries at all. The report does not even acknowledge this as a problem.
The defense of criminals as a civil rights cause is only an extreme manifestation of what has apparently become the very essence of the civil rights movement. Do black children fail to achieve in school? White oppression explains their failure. (Nothing else could without blaming the victims.)
Poor black academic performance cannot be seen as a failure of black families to educate their children, or of the black community to support educational values, which are often referred to derisively as “thinking white.” Black failure can only be the result of some lingering residue of the white perfidy involved in slavery and segregation. Call it “institutional racism.”
Of course, those who invoke the phantom of “institutional racism” are too sophisticated to claim that there are actual racists lodged in our liberal education establishment who refuse to admit black children to legally integrated schools or refuse to teach them when they get there.
Instead, the concept of “institutional racism” is made to encompass an entire system of oppression that invisibly conspires to keep black children down. It may do so through culturally rigged tests; or through the failure to provide black role models in positions of authority; or by providing only underfunded schools to black neighborhoods; or as a result of the pervasive negative pressure exerted by an environment of poverty that cannot be countered with a mere six hours of school. (And, indeed, compulsory preschool is already being proposed by Al Gore and the left as a new social cure-all.)
In reality, the failure of African-American children to make the educational grade cannot be explained by any of the above factors. Statistics analyzed by the New York Times (July 4, 1999) dispel the poverty argument by establishing that impoverished white children whose parents earn less than $10,000 a year score higher on standardized SAT tests than black children whose parents earn more than $70,000.
None of the above arguments, moreover, can explain why Vietnamese children who are poor and discriminated against, whose schools are underfunded and who are culturally at a greater disadvantage than blacks, and have even fewer “role models” to inspire them, still manage to be educationally competitive.
While the oppression theme dominates public discourse, no attention is paid to the real problems that hold African-American children back. There is a symbiosis, in fact, between the political mumbo jumbo of the Kweisi Mfumes and Jesse Jacksons (abetted mightily by patronizing white liberals) and the seemingly intractable social problems of the black community.
The myth of racial oppression, invoked to explain every social deficit of blacks, is an exercise in psychological denial. Crying racism deflects attention from the actual causes of the problems that afflict African-American communities. Its net result is to deprive people and communities who could help themselves of the power to change their fate.
Nearly 70 percent of black children are born out of wedlock. A child raised in a single-parent, female-headed household is six times more likely to be poor than a child of any color born into a two-parent household. Seventy percent of youth violence is committed by males from female-headed households, regardless of race.
If the NAACP and other black leaders want to end the terrible scourge of gun violence committed by young inner-city blacks, they should launch a campaign to promote marriage and family formation in the African-American community; they should issue a moral plea to the community to stigmatize fathers who abandon their children and parents who have more children than they can afford.
Instead of waging war against law enforcement agencies and supporting destructive racial demagogues like Al Sharpton, they should support the Rudy Giulianis and other champions of public safety, whom they now attack. They should campaign for a tripling of police forces in inner-city areas to protect the vast majority of inhabitants who are law-abiding and who are the true victims of the predators among them.
But to take these remedial steps would require rejecting the bogus charge of white oppression. It would mean abandoning the ludicrous claim that white America and firearms manufacturers are the cause of the problems afflicting African-Americans. It would mean taking responsibility for their own communities instead.
Maybe fathers stop breeding like goats?
There is a reason to swear an oath.
Ku Klux Klansmen don’t have to dirty their sheets anymore—Blacks have killed more than the KKK ever did. They are laughing their heads off as black people are destroying themselves in drug use, violence and intermarrying with other races—In the future there will be no American blacks left. A sad commentary on Martin Luther King’s dream.
I’ll freely admit I stopped reading after the firs paragraph, seems that as I get older my tolerance for Bullshit gets lower.
Am I understanding him correctly? What I am taking away from this is “ Don’t sell guns to Black People because they will kill each other” Is he really saying that he doesn’t believe Black people can be responsible gun owners? I find that insulting and ludicrous!
Funny, it’s always about the almighty $.
I chuckled a bit there.
Hard to believe that Salon actually published a piece by David Horowitz.
Of course, as long as Blacks listen to leaders like Derrick Bell and his "Critical Race Theory" (of which Obama is an avid adherent), Whitey will always be blamed and responsibility (the embracing of which is the foundation of growth) will once again be smoothly (and with laser-like accuracy) be pointed toward Whitey and America.
The comforting thought about all this is that its specious reasoning will eventually explode in the faces of those who try, oh try, to believe it.
KA BOOM!
If you want a life...if you want to live...you must take responsibility for your actions.
Otherwise, you're just a quitter.
And quitting is a form of suicide. It may not be instantaneous...but it is just as deadly.
Don't tell anyone at the NAACP or anyone else still clinging to the "plantation" about that, though.
They will use the courts against gun manufacturers and the NFL the same way they have used them against the tobacco industry. It will be a slow death. Glad I’m old enough I won’t be around to see it.
“I’ll freely admit I stopped reading after the firs paragraph, seems that as I get older my tolerance for Bullshit gets lower.
Am I understanding him correctly? What I am taking away from this is “ Don’t sell guns to Black People because they will kill each other” Is he really saying that he doesn’t believe Black people can be responsible gun owners? I find that insulting and ludicrous!”
Yeah, flat out, blatant racism isn’t the answer. Post like this give Freepers a bad name. When the libs say, “They’re racist!” and paste threads like this, it puts us back a bit....
when African-Americans are outlawed, only outlaws will have African-Americans....
Actually, that seems to be the gist of what the NAACP is saying with their ridiculous law suit.
Mark
Let me put us back a bit more with some recent facts...
So I did a bit of math with the crime stats from the FBI (2010 UCR reporting) and some census data (again 2010).
So here’s the numbers, like them or not.
1) 50% of all murder victims in 2011 were African-American.
2) 52 % of all murderers in 2011 were African-American (if their race was known and a significant fraction was unknown).
3) The murder rate (not including manslaughter) in the US in 2011 (4.1 per 100K) is half what it was in 1992, and the rate has been falling since 1992, its not an all at once thing.
4) Given that African-Americans make up 14% of the US population and commit half of all murders, that implies…
a) The murder rate for non-African-Americans (86% of the US population) is something like half the national average (about 2.3/100K) – about the same as that of Finland.
b) The murder rate for African-Americans is about 15/100K - roundly the same as the murder rate in Mexico.
c) African-American men ages 13-39 are about 2.4% of the population of the US in 2011 and account for an estimated 40% of all murders.
5) About half of all murders in the US are committed with handguns (again, as of 2011).
Conclusion: Unless and until we control young urban Black males killing other young urban Black males we’re not going to significantly reduce murder rates in the US.
Opinion: Americans don’t believe giving up their fundamental right to armed self-defense is a price worth paying to stop street thugs engaged in the narcotics trade from killing each other at a high rate.
http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/crime-in-the-u.s.-2011/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-1
http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/crime-in-the-u.s.-2011/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-3
http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/crime-in-the-u.s.-2011/tables/table-1
http://factfinder2.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/productview.xhtml?pid=DEC_10_SF2_QTP1&prodType=table
http://factfinder2.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/productview.xhtml?pid=ACS_11_1YR_S0101&prodType=table
As an aside, this article is one reason why I will forever despise Hitchens. He just HAD to earn his left wing credentials by parroting the BS racist statistics put out by the I-HATE-WHITEY-CROWD.
According to an NAACP press release, African-American males between the ages of 15 and 24 are almost five times more likely to be injured by firearms than are white males in the same age group. “Firearm homicide has been the leading cause of death among young African-American males for nearly 30 years,” it stated.
In the words of a certain black comedian, "Stop breaking the law!" Americans are so stupid, they can take absolute facts and figures and create a fictional fantasy with a straight face about companies that make machines that are highly regulated being evil. For the record, it's easier for underaged felons with multiple DUIs to buy liquor than it is for them to buy guns. And liquor kills far more than do guns.
I'm sorry. You two are going to have to give some concrete examples of where Horowitz is "racist" with this article. I see nothing racist at all about it.
Maybe the solution is to just lockup all black males from age 15 to 24.
Afteral, if it saves at least one life it will be worth it, right? As long as the president wants to walk all over the constitution, this may work better.
Maybe the solution is to just lockup all black males from age 15 to 24.
Afteral, if it saves at least one life it will be worth it, right? As long as the president wants to walk all over the constitution, this may work better.
I didn't take it that way. Anything can and does get clicked and pasted out of context.
Mastador is simply pointing out the rediculous parody that this article produces. Drill down and just look at the facts that are presented. Then they point out that the statistics are different for whites. Then they blame the problem on gun manufactures and laws about who should be able to buy what guns. The NAACP, by their own logic and statistical presentation, should support a solution that makes the sale of firearms to blacks illegal. Their report here suggests that lives would be saved.
I’m not doubting your numbers. Actually, I am impressed with them. My issue is “control young urban black males”. How do we do that? Throw them in a gated area in California?
I guess in a sense, I am an elitist. My city has been voted one of the most dangerous cities in America. Yet, the majority of murders happen in an 8 square block area. It is drug dealer on drug dealer crimes. Even the police admit it and they keep it in that small area by protecting everything in the outskirts. Why? Maybe it’s a “thin the herd” mentality. I know one thing, I stay away from that area.
We’ve seen it all before. American Indians, American Cowboys, the Irish, Italians, and the list goes on throughout the decades. We’ve had our share of “Race specific killers”.
It’s when we post, “Guns don’t kill black people, other blacks do”, it comes off as a generalization. That can be dangerous. All black people aren’t out to kill.
It may have just been the title that threw me off. It puts us in a bad light....
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